AirCare

Team 18 - Pulkith, Arjun, and Pragya

AirCare - a portable air sensor that lets you know about the air quality in a region displayed on the device itself. You can also open the mobile app to view a history of the air quality in the region.

Inspiration

Moldy freshman dorms, the polluted streets of Philadelphia. AirCare was inspired from personal tales of our own college experiences and the need for clean, breathable air.

What it does

AirCare lets you know when the air quality is concerning our dangerous. Integrating a mobile app, you can view the air quality in your room from across the globe. When there is serious concentrations of hazardous pollutants, AirCare's dual fans engage to bring in fresh air and ensure the air remains breathable and safe.

How we built it

We used Arduino components for the physical device, using a DHT and MQ135 sensor, a LCD panel, potentiometers, LEDs, a buzzer, a real-time clock, external 9V batteries, DC motors, other small components, and lots and lots of duct tape. The housing was lasercut. The mobile app and server were built in Swift and Python, with Flask, Ngrok, Cpanel, and MongoDB among other tools and resources.

Challenges we ran into

The largest challenge we ran into, was sending HTTP PUT requests from the Arduino. The Arduino was only able to handle sending updates to the server constantly for about 15–20 seconds before it crashed. Therefore, we had to add significant handling for when the Arduino froze, to dynamically send updates at the limit the Arduino was able to handle, while also ensuring the mobile app was updated as much as possible.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Successfully creating a physical product that can reduce smartphone distractions effectively. The integration of hardware and software to create a functional and interactive device that encourages better study and work habits is a significant achievement.

What we learned

In this project we learned about using gas sensors, creating our own Arduino libraries, incorporating external power sources with an Arduino, sending HTTP requests from an Arduino, creating a websocket on an Arduino, and integrating an Arduino with IoT without using the cloud agent.

What's next for AirCare

The future of AirCare could include the ability to update the threshold and fan speeds from the mobile app, using a machine learning model, so the sensor can learn over time in order to better understand a changing environment, driving the motors directly from the power supply, so there's no need to replace batteries, and developing a PCB to make the device much smaller and more compact.

Built With

• arduino